I don't yet know where the mic stacks up, but the cans sound lovely, the headband and earcups and comfy, and the cabling seems very nice.

The downside is that the QC seems a bit lacking, because one of the two mic jacks on the headset is kaput!

Long and short: I don't think I can recommend these in good conscience. Assuming they're not fragile, they really are superb, but I would hate for somebody to spend $200 on a headset to have the microphone not work at all.
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An Exceedingly Mixed Monday

2009.04.07 11:05 - Miscellanea

Busted my teapot, cut my foot on the glass fragments, spent an hour and change searching fruitlessly for a suitable replacement, spent most of the evening with a headache, and waited 45 minutes for other people to play games without anyone showing up.

On the other hand, received a copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in the mail, it seems Magpul has shipped my back-ordered rifle sling, gaming happened (five minutes after I got up from the desk, naturally) and was pretty hilarious (Left4Dead with 1.5 second pings == lag-based hilarity), and a dose of generic NyQuil sorted out the headache and still-lingering head cold for the remainder of the night. And I got my new headset working, finally!
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Probably something to do with poor sales and profitability, but their unwillingness to import them in any significant number and desire to price the gun two to three hundred dollars higher than most of its competition doesn't do them any favors. Unfortunate, that.

I guess I'll scrape up the money somewhere. I'd really like to grab one in .40S&W: I don't care for the caliber at all, but it ought to be possible to get a 9mm barrel and settle concerns about hot 9mm ammunition.

[Update: Stephen Camp updates in that same thread that Browning (well, a Browning/Winchester "PR person" claims the Hi-Power will be not be discontinued.

but I can't quite help but be irritated by the reinstatement of blocks on a bunch of websites I use (like Twitter). I'm sure it's temporary, but it's irritating all the same.
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Who Reads The Watchmen?

2009.03.09 15:04 - Entertainment, Comics, Movies

I haven't been to the theater yet to see Watchmen. I'm expecting to be somewhat disappointed based on the magnitude of the hype and on my experience with the book itself. As far as it goes, I thought Squadron Supreme had a better foundation, and that Kingdom Come was Squadron Supreme with better writing and art.

Watchmen, its value as a cultural artifact aside, has always left me ... lukewarm, I guess. The art's interesting, the comic is compelling in its way, but the conclusion and certain of the key, underlying assumptions don't work for me and the result seems hollow. Maybe it made more sense in the 1980's, when the Cold War was a going concern and we worried more about WWIII being one very hot, very short exchange of extreme hostilities, rather than a long, tedious struggle against religious extremists.

In the end, though, Watchmen, the comic book, seems to me mostly a story about a paranoid, sociopathic right-winger and a nebbish with a costume fetish losing out against New Progressive Man and a literal Man of Science. Honestly, it's a hard story to like. As for spoilers: Watchmen was published in 1986. There's a statute of limitations on this stuff.